Motherhood and Late-Victorian Feminism
Motherhood and Late-Victorian Feminism

Summary/Abstract: "When American writer Gertrude Atherton visited London in 1889, her introduction to Mona Caird might have been a historic meeting. Only a year earlier Caird had shot to notoriety after the Westminster Review published her essay “Marriage” (1888), in which she argued that marriage was a patriarchal system which adapted primitive standards to modern society. The Daily Telegraph, seeking to enliven its pages during the “silly season” of late summer, used Caird’s essay as an excuse to ask its readers, “Is Marriage a Failure?” Over the following six weeks, until the Whitechapel murders seized the media’s full attention, the newspaper received more than twenty seven thousand responses."

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